Post 11: Script Influences

In class we have been watching numerous short films, and some of which have been of the French New Wave genre. One film which we watched and one which influenced our ideas for our own short film was The 400 Blows. This is a french film directed by Francois Truffaut. It is set in Paris and is part of the French New Wave movement. We particularly liked the ending scene. The boy is continuously running and comes to the beach and reaches the water where he realises he can run no further. The film then ends with a close up on the boy's face. We particularly liked this part of the film as it linked in with the ideas we had got for our own short film. The young boy in our film is very alone and isolated and feels trapped where he is in life and so when he reaches the hedge it shows he has reached his furthest point and can not reach any 

further. 
















Another element which has influenced us is lighting. Many of the short films we watched used natural lighting rather than artificial.We felt that this would work quite well in our short film as we are trying to portray loneliness and having dim and natural light will help us achieve this. If we used artificial lighting it may appear too bright for what we wanted to portray. Having natural lighting will help the audience read more into the film. If we used bright artificial lighting then the audience may feel a bit confused as to what is happening in the story as we would be contradicting the theme of loneliness.

This is a still from a Hollywood film using artificial lighting. We feel lighting like this would be too bright for our own film.
















We also discussed the camera position. This is very important when shooting anything, but from doing research and looking at different camera positions in different short films we have seen the effects of what lighting in the wrong place can do to the picture and also what different effects positions can help achieve. For example if we was shooting by a window we would have to position the camera carefully so that if any sunlight was reflecting through we would avoid casting shadows or hiding the character's face. This would also help the audience when watching the film, as they want to be able to clearly see what is going on in the scene and if they can't see the characters or other objects in the scene then they may miss out on a crucial part of the storyline, therefore leaving them confused.


 This picture shows the camera filming into the sunlight, creating shadows and making it not very clear what is in the room. This is not what we want for our film.





When looking at the editing we wanted for our short film we discussed things like  music. We wanted to create an atmosphere and have some shots in silence with atmosphere noise. We also created our own piece of piano music in which we wanted to use in our short film. We felt that by creating our own music would mean we would really be able to get the right tone and we would be able to play around with different notes to find the one that suits the film the most.We also wanted quite a slow editing pace between scenes. For example our scenes are much longer than you would usually expect to see, and this fits in with our influences from the French New Wave genre. We feel if our short film is edited together the way we hope and the music fits then it will help the audience to engage with Billy and understand and empathise with him.

Post 10: Script Writing

In class, we have watched many various short films each of which we have looked at in detail at how the storyline attracts the audience and how different storylines can be used rather than the typical equilibrium, disequiblirium, equilibrium restored process. The short films which we have watched are very different from the usual Hollywood type films that we were used to seeing. Many of the short films told a very short story and almost left the audience to think of an ending for themselves. For example in Jade, it was not clear to the audience who the two men were, whether one of them could be her baby's father and there were many engimas that the audience faced.

For our own short film we have discussed many ideas and we have changed them and edited them around to make the best possible short film we feel we could make. As a group we brainstormed lots of plot outlines for our short film and then discussed where we could go with each of them. For example we took each idea and then came up with ideas for locations, characters, costumes, endings and a brief outline of the story from beginning to end. We decided to use our final idea about a young boy who is feeling very alone and isolated. We chose this idea as we had more ideas of what we could put into the film and what locations we could use. We thought as it was a young boy we could use our school to film in to show his school life and as the surrounding area of our school is mainly houses, we thought we could encorporate this into our film showing our character living near to the school.


This is a picture of my brainstorm of ideas:

Synopsis of our Short Film:
Billy is trying to cope with his non-existent relationship with his mother and coping at school with the teachers and the uncomfortable life he is in. When it becomes too much Billy has only one area of comfort but when he hears news that changes everything will this area of comfort be enough for him to cope.


After creating the first draft of the initial idea and having created a synopsis, we presented it to some different possible audience members and asked them for some feedback and their thoughts.

First Daft of Script

After gaining feedback from our initial ideas we managed to create a first draft of our script. We took into consideration what the feedback said and tried to encorporate it when writing the script. 

BLACK SCREEN- TITLES

Loud background noise, children talking.

HARD CUT: EXT. OUTSIDE BILLY’S HOUSE IN THE ALLEY WAY

Billy steps out of his house, walks round the corner into the alley.

LONG SHOT: EXT. TOP OF THE ALLEY WAY

Billy is walking to school on the phone to his mum.

BILLY

Why, where you going to be?

BILLY

Ok, so what time will you be home?

Billy

Oh ok then, maybe see you tomorrow then.

MUM hangs up the phone.

MEDIUM LONG SHOT: EXT ALLEY WAY

Billy is continuing to walk to school.

HARD CUT: INT. CLASSROOM

Billy runs in late and the teacher tells him off.

TEACHER

Late again Billy?

Billy puts his head down and walks to his seat.

HARD CUT: EXT: OUTSIDE CANTEEN

Billy is trying to push through the crowds.

HARD CUT: INT: UNDER THE STAIRS

Billy is looking at people walking by, he rings his mum.

BILLY

Mum, I feel ill can you come pick me up?

BILLY

But mum please, it’s horrible here.

MUM hangs up the phone.

CLOSE UP: Billy starts scratching at his wrist.

HARD CUT: EXT: QUAD

Billy is walking through the quad alone.

FREEZE FRAME: CLOSE UP ON BILLY’S FACE.

CUT TO CREDITS ON BLACK SCREEN.

Post 9A: Research Into Your Target Audience

The Demographic of Short Film Audiences
The demographic characteristics of an audience include things such as:
Age
    
Gender





Ethnicity and Race

Economic status



and many others. http://wps.ablongman.com/ab_public_speaking_2/24/6223/1593259.cw/index.html


The Psychographic of Short Film Audiences
There are many types of psychographics in short film audiences.

One type is the Achiever. The Achiever is roughly around 5-7% of the whole population. A typical type of Acheiver is a serious business person who constantly is searching to become better and build what they have around them. A common word to describe an Achiever would be 'workaholic'. As an audience, Achievers like to be drawn in quickly and not waste time, they want individuality and are interested in power and money.



A second type of psychographic is the Balanced type. This group is the smallest of them all and accounts for around 1-2% of the whole population. It is a mixture between the Achiever group and the Socially Conscious groups. They are Achievers with a Social Conscience, not so selfish. The balanced group is split into two subgroups, the repentant sinner and the true philantropist. The repentant sinner needs goals to be met and a solution must be achieved. To them, making a profit is not a main issue, therefore when looking at films, they will not be searching for big Hollywood Blockbusters and may be more settled with a short film.
On the other hand, a true philantropist will usually do research around the film they are interested in seeing and then decide from there whether they actually want to go ahead and watch it or not. This is why it is important for us to think about and include websites in our postcards for our audiences to be able to research around it and read more into what it is about.


Short Film Distribution Methods
When Hollywood films distirbute their films they have a wide variety of methods in which they can use. Their target audience will be so diverse that they can use methods such as film trailers, posters, billboards, bus displays and some even create toys, for example Toy Story worked together with McDonalds and sold Toy Story toys with Happy Meals in order for the young children to see the toys and then want to see the film. 

However, for short film it is a lot harder to reach the audience you want. Short films are less talked about and less advertised around and so hearing about short films is a lot harder. Short film producers don't use methods such as billboards or trailers, as their films are a lot shorter, they don't include A list celebrity actors and they don't normally have a huge budget like the Hollywood films would.
Short films use postcards instead of posters. Postcards still give out similar information to what you find on a film poster but it is a more simpler, cheaper method for short films. As short films are more low key, the target audience becomes harder to approach.

This is an example of a short film postcard.



Where Hollywood films would use the cinema to promote new films, short films need to use other methods such as the internet or short film festivals to promote new and upcoming short films. Short film festivals are a great place for distributing new short films as the people who attend these festivals have knowledge and interest in short films and so will be more interested in what new short films are coming out rather than those in cinemas. 

Short Film Festivals

There are many short film festivals in which producers go along and promote their new short films, some to get distributors to help them distribute and market their film and others just to get promotion and audience. Other main film festivals have short film categories in which short films have the opportunity to win awards and promote their films further. 

One short film festival is Encounters International Film Festival.

http://www.encounters-festival.org.uk/

This is a short film festival which takes place during September and allows short film makers to attend and to show their new creations. 

Another film festival is the Sundance Film Festival.

http://www.sundance.org/festival/

This film festival has various categories, including one for short films. 

In the following article: 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/21/DD5KST9SF.DTL

It talks about ways of distributing short films.

it says. 'Creators of short films (40 minutes or less) have finally found an audience through such online sites as iTunes, Revver.com and San Francisco's Frameline Films and Caachi.com, which specializes in distributing independent films. And those sites are even starting to bring a revenue trickle to older shorts that audiences are unearthing online.'

This shows that the internet plays a very big part when distributing short films. 

It also shows that although short films may have a harder time to distribute their films to their target audiences, it doesn't stop them creating them. 

'This year 5,088 short films were submitted to the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, up from 4,445 last year'.

Post 9: Short Film Research

Why make a short film?
Short films a made for many various reasons. Before starting our planning for our own short film we looked at some of the reasons as to why people do make short films. I used two articles from The Telegraph to research more into this.

The first article I looked at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-life/7593291/The-long-history-of-short-films.html written by Rebecca Davies talks about how films were made when they first began, all starting out short being known as a 'one-shot actuality'. She also talks about how progress in the film industry meant that improving recording and editing equipment and technology allowed film makers to create longer, multi-shot films. From around 1910, competition between studios increased and the demand from audience continued to grow storng and these both induced film makers to make even longer films. This led onto the multi-reel films and the first feature film was created. As feature films continued to grow and slowly become popular with audiences, short films were being pushed behind. Feature films had star power and their length and narrative complexity allowed them to be compared more with theatre and opera, grabbing the interests of the audiences. However, short films were not completely disregarded. Some short films, especially those that showed British servicemen actively fighting the war, proved to be very popular, but there were also concerns that the cinema would gain a reputation as an 'interfering marm’ if it dedicated too much time to short government films and not enough to the feature films upon which the magic of the pictures rested.

The second article I looked at from The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-life/7593767/Short-films-that-launched-big-names.html written by Horatia Harrod looks at 10 short films that shot their makers to stardom, launched directorial careers, and established studios as major players. It looks at films such as The Spirit of Christmas, Bottle Rocket and Machete.

The Spirit of Christmas was created in 1992 by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They used construction paper, glue and an 8mm film camera. Their film got recognised by Brian Graden, an executive at Fox who then gave them $2000 to make a similar video he could send his friends. They had an $750 budget. It soon went viral after being sent out to 80 people. After people recognised their work they managed to sign a deal with Comedy Central and went on to create South Park and are now earning $75 million a year.

Bottle Rocket created by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson on a $4,000 budget and is a 13 minute black and white short film. Owen Wilson and his brother Luke both made their debut appearances in this short film. The film was taken to the USA Film Festival in Dallas. James Brooks, a well-known director saw the film and took the three men to LA to do rewrites and the remake was taken to the Sundance Festival and Wes and Owen received $5 million to make a feature film version of the short film.

Machete created by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino wasn't a great box office success but the trailers that appeared before the movie were. Robert Rodriguez wrote a full version of the film in 1993 but never got around to makingi t. The trailer he posted on YouTube gained huge interest and helped Robert to get the money to make the full-length film.





From reading both these articles it has helped me see the variety of short films and how well they can do. It has helped me to think of more of a variety of ideas of what to use in my short film and to think more about the audience. I think it's good that short films are still being made today as it gives more choice of film watching for audiences who don't necessarily want to watch full length feature films.

Who is the target audience for a short film?
From class discussions and independent research it is clear to see that audiences for short films vary. Short films are often made on low budgets and by independent film makers. Because short films aren't so widely publicised and advertised, the audience can be very different to mainstream Hollywood films. Short films are often shown at film festivals which producers and distributors from the industry will be at ready to watch these films. 


I have done some independent research on the internet and found http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1350979/index.html  which says that the type of audiences short films reach out to has changed quite a lot since they were first being made. 
I found this quite a lot on various different websites. Whilst for many mainstream Hollywood films they have huge budgets and a big production team, their audience is wider and slightly easier to reach. Whereas for short films, as they are lower budget and not so well known it is much harder for them to reach their audience. However, over recent new media technologies have meant that short films have been able to improve themselves and reach out to more wider audiences. 


How are short films distributed?
For short films a distributor is an individual or organisation who will represent the film at festivals and markets around the world and who will attempt to sell it to television,airlines and other companies that show short films. There are four major distributors for short films, Dazzle, Futureshorts, Network Ireland TV and Shorts International.
Short films are normally taken to numerous film festivals for distribution and showcasing new talent.

One film festival is the Bristol Encounters International Film Festival. Their awards included Children’s Animation Jury Award, Audience Award, British Special Mention Award, Documentary Award,Animated Encounters
Grand Prix and Animated Encounters Best South West.

Some of the winning films from this festival include, World's Apart, Slow Derek, Above As Below, On The Bus and A Morning Stroll.

Another festival is the Raindance Film Festival. The categories at this festival included Best International Feature, Best UK Feature, Best Debut Feature, Best Documentary, Best International Short and Film of The Festival. The winning films include Just Between Us, Stranger Things, Tilt, Love at First Sight and Reset.